A Healthcare Chat Bot Named Shaila

AUTOMATISED HEALTH CARE COMMUNICATION ON THE RISE

In April this year I and Thomas Schulz started the pilot project
Shaila under the brand Smarthealthlab. The task: to explore the fast growing
chatbot technology for healthcare with Shaila (Smart Health Artificial
Intelligence Lab Activity).

To make that algorithm more tangible we chose a visual of a
young female, gave her a face and named her with an acronym. The choice of a
female was a reflection of the impressive growth of female leaders in
healthcare, computer science and other business areas.

Thomas and I, as two healthcare professionals in technology,
business development, communications, marketing and behavioural economics
bundled our extensive knowledge into the digital life of a chatbot creation.
The aim was to set up an international digital community of healthcare
specialists for knowledge exchange, interactions, questions and answers and
dynamic developments. This is especially significant for frequently asked
questions for example, as they show great potential for automation. Shaila
takes care of a common task in healthcare communication: building a community
as are a large number of current Facebook examples — to have a closer
relationship with the desired target group.

The advantage of Shaila is that with a smart setup of the
algorithm this piece of standard communication can be transferred to the
chatbot. Working 24 hours, Shaila, with an unmatchable accuracy, finds people
who you wouldn’t find even if you surfed the web nonstop.

The challenge is to configure the suitable tech
specifications and apply a smart communication style which is related to deep
knowledge of construct and effective packaging of language elements. These
include favouring the use of ellipsis which cause through the omission of words
a “dramatising’’ effect for the readers.

Design Thinking and
Rapid Prototyping

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations
and Inspires Innovation (Brown 2009) incubated extensive research, students and
professionals within the economic system. Tim Brown points out that innovation is
a collaborative process through a rigorous examination to identify brilliant
ideas.

According to Brown, successful ideas follow an overlapping of
three criteria:

Feasibility: What
is functionally possible within the foreseeable future

Viability: What
is likely to become part of a sustainable business model

Desirability:
What makes sense to people and for people

Design thinking will bring this criteria into harmonious balance.
For the Shaila project Thomas and I followed this theory in order to come up
with a holistic idea for an evolved method of healthcare communication. But as
the technology itself was quickly developing with the speed and momentum of a
tidal wave we had to choose a suitable instrument to cope with that challenge.

Since I had been working for a long time with rapid
prototyping in my lectures, we examined Experience Prototyping (Buchenau and
Fulton Suri 2000) for inspiration about the swift prototyping of design and
context. During our discussions we produced everything from sketches to the
instant installation of chatbot algorithms like try outs, the design of a
webpage, Twitter accounts and the slack community. We went live on 1 April
2016, adjusting technology, design and context almost daily in the first 30
days. Thanks to our observations and the feedback from the first participants we
were able to construct a battle-proof system within a very short time.

Impressive Facts

After releasing Shaila into cyberspace we collected the
following within just over five months:

More than 620 followers on the Shaila Twitter account (we
never intended to reach such a goal so quickly as Shaila invites participants
into the Smarthealthlab account as a landing page)

From June to August we had 226,100 impressions in 91 days,
four link clicks per day, one retweet per day, 18 likes per day and one answer
per day

We deduced that the visitor profile was 65 percent male
with the top four interests being technology (83 percent), tech news (77
percent), entrepreneurship (76 percent) and marketing (70 percent)

More than 1,400 followers in the Smarthealthlab Twitter account.
This exceeded our expectations

A bout 130 healthcare professionals in our Slack community

There was some resistance from invited people as they told
us they didn’t like the chatbot approach. Others couldn’t follow the idea of an
algorithm with a face and the name Shaila as they thought it was a real robot
existing somewhere delivering static answers. But the majority were fascinated,
interested, wanted to know more and registered in our free Slack community.

As flanking activities we started a blog and a new form of
instant interviews, shot from the hip so to speak, with immediate publication
via Periscope and our Youtube channel.

A bot provides a basic service in communication which is
already standardised, so it makes sense to transfer such routines to an algorithm
which always delivers the same performance quality. The experts however stay on
top of the work by monitoring and getting into the game when their expertise is
necessary in a talk or when they invite the community to join a specific closed
user group according to their needs. Through this, patients or customers can
enter an individual private premium space where they enjoy the chargeable full
care package.

What’s Next

In under a semester we have connected worldwide healthcare professionals
and brought them into a constant exchange while simultaneously being able to
influence the further development of the community. Our next frontier is
participatory design. It’s about sending and receiving information and
adjusting the continuing construction of a powerful contact instrument for
hospitals and all the other market participants.

Now we have already received the first enquiries to have a
look at healthcare communication projects which could be transferred to a
chatbot. These include community building, registration processes or product
hunts. We are ready to deliver individual chatbot solutions for hospitals and
the healthcare market.

To heat up the situation we will carry out the first online chatbot
conference under the brand botscamp.co on 7 December 2016. As with the Shaila
community, there will be no travel costs, no travel time and the option of
being able to push the replay button to attend all planned 20 sessions. Since it
is a camp, participants will vote for the 20 sessions they would like to see
and follow. By applying the participatory design idea we will let the
participants have an impact by their interactivity.

How Shaila Works

Shaila is a Twitter account @shailabot

Shaila invites specific healthcareprofessionals from the Twitter
world via the account of @smarthealthlab into a Slack community according to
the definitions/profiles in the algorithm;

Registration is free

Within the Slack community there is general chat as well
as specific forums

Shaila is answering more and more questions from the
participants in a form of dynamic development monitored by the creators

Born and based in Zürich, Switzerland, Maurice focuses case
studies in healthcare communication, marketing and behaviour economics. While
the background of his studies was the environment of constructivistic didactics
at the University of Applied Sciences Zürich, the teaching in Zürich at the EB
Zürich School targets social marketing for nonprofit organisations. His
collaborative knowledge exchange procedures led to the formation of Scaph Swiss
Communication and the Marketing Association of Public Health as the first
president as well as to lectures at the West Pomeranian University of
Technology in Szczecin, Poland and the University of Bucharest. He is a speaker
and member of programme commissions at congresses and currently works as the
co-founder of Smarthealthlab on the development and investigation of the
chatbot technology in healthcare communication.